Race Card

If you’re a conservative, or just someone who thinks everyone should be treated equally, you’ve probably been called a racist at one point or another. And if, like most people, you’re a decent person, you’ve probably been taken aback and left wondering if maybe, subconsciously, you did hold beliefs and attitudes that were racist.

Stop wondering. You’re not. In fact, as Derryck Green of Project 21 explains in this Prager University video, it’s the American Left that harbors the racist attitudes, rooted in the assumption that Blacks just can’t compete, the infamous “soft bigotry of low expectations:”

So, relax. You’re not racist for believing we can all be held to the same standards. Far from it.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Sunday he and President Obama have been targets of “a racial animus” by some of the administration’s political opponents.

“There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. … There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”Holder said the nation is in “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years ago.”

“We’ve made lots of progress,” he said. “I sit here as the first African-American attorney general, serving the first African-American president of the United States. And that has to show that we have made a great deal of progress.

“But there’s still more we have to travel along this road so we get to the place that is consistent with our founding ideals,” he said.

Eric Holder wouldn’t recognize our “founding ideals” even if they walked up to him and gave him a big wet kiss.

It’s gracious of him to admit we’ve made a lot of progress since the days of slavery and Jim Crow, both of which his party once fought to defend, but it would be nice if he would allow that administration opponents could themselves have good motives. And I’m not letting get away with that weaselly qualification “some,” as if he really believes that “just a few” are racist toward he and the president.

No, to a racialist ideologue like Eric Holder, that we may strongly disapprove of Obama’s policies and actions can’t be due to his and his administration’s leftist philosophy, redistributionist politics, rampant corruption, lack of respect for the American settlement, and overall incompetence. No, it has to be due to the fact that we don’t like a Black man in the White House.

I guess all those years in the late 90s when I backed Colin Powell for president was just a clever disguise on my part.

This, sadly, is what we can expect from the Left, who assume they have the course of History figured out and are therefore both smarter and morally superior to the rest of us. It’s an assumption of self-righteousness, a certainty that, since “we” know the right answers, strong opposition or serious difference of opinion is illegitimate. No principle, no reason, no empirical evidence could be behind it: it has to be racism.

PPS: If you want to know more about the worst Attorney General since John Mitchell or even A. Mitchell Palmer, let me recommend two books: J. Christian Adams’ “Injustice,” and “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric holder’s Justice Department,“ by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. If these don’t leave steam coming out your ears, there’s something wrong.

Amidst all the other outrageous outrages that outrage the outraged Left these days, you may have noticed a controversy (well, controversial to the Left) over the team name of the Washington Redskins, a name the team has used for over 80 years with no one complaining (1).

Well, no one until Harry Reid, the national Democrats, and the Left (but I repeat myself) decided they needed something, anything, to distract people from the failures of Obamacare and the lousy economy (and the crashing foreign policy and… Well, you get the idea.). Hence, in the last year or so, the professional Left has turned on the Redskins, decrying their name as offensive, hateful, and …brace yourselves… “racist” against American Indians. (2) The way they carry on, you’d think they were fighting the civil rights battles of the 50s and 60s all over again.

And, in fact, according to Dennis Prager, that is indeed one of the reasons the Left has gone bonkers over the team name: it makes them feel good, as if they’re reliving the battles of their fathers and grandfathers. Call it a self-esteem booster shot. Writing at Real Clear Politics, he give four additional reasons for the Left’s mania. It’s a good article, so click through for the rest, but I want to highlight one that I think cuts to the root of the matter:

Fifth, and finally, the left is totalitarian at heart. Whenever possible, they seek control of others; and they love to throw their considerable weight around. The left-wing president does it so often that the Supreme Court has unanimously shot down his attempts on a dozen occasions. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, under huge pressure from leftists, just dropped conservative Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist George Will. Under pressure from left-wing professors and students, Brandeis and other universities dropped the few conservative speakers they had invited to this year’s commencement exercises. Forcing the Redskins to do their will is just the left’s latest attempt to force its views on the vast majority of its fellow citizens. That’s why it’s worth fighting for the Redskins. Today it’s the Redskins, tomorrow it’s you.

Emphasis added. Ever hear the expression “the personal is the political?” It was a rallying cry of the student movement and leftist feminists in the 60s that argued there was no separation between daily life (work, play, family, sports, &c.) and what we think of as traditional politics (elections, legislation, and so on). Every aspect of your personal life, including your recreation, is as much open to politics as is your choice of party to support. Support a team the name of which some faction finds politically incorrect, and you’ll be subject to political action to make you change your ways and the way you think. Our Betters on the Left know what’s best for us all and they have a driving urge to make sure we all conform.

Even if all you want to do is watch your favorite team and forget about the world for a while.

Footnote:
(1) There’s a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showing that less than ten percent of American Indians find the name “Redskins” offensive. It’s from 2004, however, so it might be interesting to resurvey that.
(2) No disrespect intended to members of the various tribal nations, but I’ve never liked the term “Native American” when referring to the descendants of the people who were here before the European colonization. I was born here, my parents were born here, my grandparents were born here, and so were most of my great-grandparents. I’m native to America, too, and I refuse to use a term that in any way slights my right to be here.

Oh, brother. If we needed any more convincing that it was well-past time for Senator Jay Rockfeller (D-WV) to retire and never be heard from again, this clip of him not just playing the race card, but slamming it on the table and dancing around it should do the trick:

Apparently the senator’s “analysis” was aimed at Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was at the hearing. Naturally, Johnson took offense:

“My opposition to health care has nothing to do with the race of President Obama,” Johnson said. “I objected to this because it’s an assault on our freedom. … I found it very offensive that you would basically imply that I’m a racist because I oppose this health care law.”

“You’re evidently satisfied with a lot of people not having health insurance,” Rockefeller responded.

“I am not. Quit making those assumptions. Quit saying I’m satisfied with that. I’m not. There’s another way of doing this,” Johnson said. “Please, don’t assume, don’t make implications of what I’m thinking and what I would really support. You have no idea.”

“I actually do,” Rockefeller said. “God help you.”

“No senator, God help you for implying I’m a racist,” Johnson replied.

But the senator from West Virginia didn’t just slam his colleague from Wisconsin; he cavalierly insulted all of us who oppose the Affordable Care Act. While I can’t speak for others, let me recapitulate the reasons I oppose it:

Political Philosophy: By placing the State in charge of people’s healthcare, you fundamentally alter the relationship between citizen and State, turning free people into dependent wards of a Leviathan-like government and taking away their control over a crucial part of their own lives. To a conservative/classical liberal like me, this is a bad thing.

Constitutionalism: Congress has no authority –none!– to force a citizen to buy a private product under penalty of law. This is an abominable legislative usurpation and a trammeling of individual liberty. It tortures the Commerce Clause until it begs for mercy. It goes against the spirit and intent of our founding documents, and the Supreme Court, in the worst decision since Korematsu, was wrong to uphold the law.

Bad Law: I’ll be more charitable than Senator Rockefeller and stipulate that most voting for this law thought they were doing good and helping people. But that doesn’t justify defending a law that just isn’t working. It’s not even meeting its basic goals: healthcare premiums are still skyrocketing; millions have lost the insurance they liked; millions have lost access to the doctors they liked; and, even when you have insurance, you may not be able to find a physician who will take you. (Really. Watch that one.) When a law performs as poorly as this, is it any wonder people hate it? Are they all racists, Jay?

Somehow, looking over those reasons, I think it’s safe to say the President’s ancestry doesn’t matter to me and my opposition to his miserable law. In fact, I can quite honestly say I couldn’t give a rat’s rear end about President Obama’s race.

But I don’t expect you to get that, Senator.

PS: On a lighter note, I’m happy to say Andrew Klavan is back at last making satirical political videos. Longtime readers will recall my love for his “Klavan on the Culture” series. Now he’s returned, producing them for Truth Revolt. (He also still works with PJMedia and PJTV) In this video, he explains what we’ve all wondered: Just why do Democrats call us racist? Enjoy.

Jonah Goldberg listened to an NPR story about the defeat in the Senate of radical Leftist lawyer Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Per NPR, a “handful of Southern Democrats” (1) voted with the Republicans to defeat Adegbile. Here’s the roster:

Chris Coons (Del.)

Bob Casey (Pa.)

Mark Pryor (Ark.)

Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.)

Joe Manchin (W.V.)

Joe Donnelly (Ind.)

John Walsh (Mont.)

Harry Reid (NV)

Apparently I’m not as knowledgeable about US History as I thought; I completely missed Pennsylvania and Indiana joining the Confederacy, and I didn’t realize the South butted up against Canada.

NPR: “National Public Reactionaries.”

Footnote:
(1) Hint to the Morning Edition producers — Jim Crow ended a long time ago.

According to MSNBC pundit Timothy Noah, workers at the Chattanooga Volkswagen assembly plant rejected membership in the United Auto Workers union because they were a bunch of mouthing-breathing, knuckle-dragging, Southern racists:

“The South has always been hostile territory for union organizing. Y’know, as Harold said, the culture war in the South trumps the class war. You already have in a number of Southern states right to work laws, which means that even if they had unionized the plants, those who benefited from the presence of that union wouldn’t have had to pay union dues if they didn’t feel like it. So you’re in an overwhelmingly hostile climate.

And the opposition I gather, through, portrayed this as a kind of northern invasion, a re-fighting of the Civil War. Apparently there are not a lot of, uh, black employees in this particular plant. And so, that kind of, uh, uh, uh, waving of the Confederate flag was an effective strategy.”

Yep, those Johnny Rebs in Tennessee just took a pull on the whiskey jug, channeled the spirit Jeff Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and voted down the union, because they wanted to re-fight the Chattanooga campaign. It couldn’t have been because they made a rational economic decision as free people that the union didn’t provide enough benefits to warrant the dues they’d have to pay. Nah. It just had to be because there were so few Blacks there in the workforce that they weren’t afraid to show their real, neo-Confederate faces.

Who’s the bigot again, Timmy?

RELATED: Naturally, the UAW wants the NLRB to overturn the election results and call a new vote. Typical: If you can’t win, vote and vote again until the rubes vote the way they’re told. What do they think this is, the EU?

The Hill reports that liberal icon/Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) is engaged in his usual unhinged activities, you know, like raising money off of equating the Tea Party to the KKK and stuff (via Memeorandum):

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), a liberal firebrand known for his controversial comments, compared the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan in an email to supporters that features a photo of a burning cross.

He also charges that the “ultimate Tea Party Republican desire” is to “bring about the End of Days.”

The comments were blasted to Grayson’s supporters in a Monday email that also features a picture of a burning cross, with two KKK members in the background, forming the first letter T of the words “Tea Party.” The KKK is known to burn crosses near communities they hope to intimidate.

“Now you know what the ‘T’ stands for,” reads the caption on the photo.

Clicking the photo directs supporters to a contribution page.

In case any of you might be thinking that Grayson (who refuses to apologize) is a one off, a guy who doesn’t speak for the rest of his party, think again. He’s just bluntly saying what many in the Democrat party already feel about the Tea Party – and Republicans in general, but are too chicken to say. With exceptions, of course, like his Congressional colleague and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, also from Florida, who has talked in the recent past about how Republicans want to “drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws” with Voter ID laws. And using the word “drag” was not by accident. Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s comments – as well as Grayson’s – have been echoed in milder terms (sometimes not so mild) by Democrats right here in North Carolina in response to our recently passed and signed into law Voter ID legislation. This in spite of the fact that it was North Carolina Democrats who instituted Jim Crow laws here and who also passed laws making it legal to forcibly sterilize ‘undesirables” (hint: black citizens). But we won’t waste any more time on pesky facts …

It’s interesting. For a party that is supposedly in such “good shape” prior to 2014 elections, the Democrats sure are desperate to use the race card quite often. Usually they use it when they’re in political trouble. But now …? Hmm.

Anyway, I tweeted to Grayson that I would guarantee there are a many, many, many more Commies/Socialists in his party than there are racists in the Tea Party. However, I didn’t think about it until after the fact that he would probably consider that to be a compliment. Oh well …

There’s a great article by Shelby Steele in the Wall St. Journal on the decline and decay of the American civil rights movement, a fall made almost inevitable by its very success. And, on the so-called leaders of today’s movement, Steele nails the real reasons they went after George Zimmerman: to pretend they’re still relevant and to keep their power over society.

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

If these “leaders” truly cared about the condition of Blacks in America more than they do about their next appearance in front of the cameras, they’d start doing something about the devastation of the Black family, in which, as Steele points out, 73% of all Black children are born without fathers married to their mothers.

But they don’t. They’re wedded to an outdated vision of America and the power exploiting that vision gives them.

PS: Steele expounds on this theme of the decay of the civil rights movement and the exploitation of victimization in his “White Guilt,” which I highly recommend.

Well, not in so many words, but that was the gist of the Florida senator’s remarks during an interview this morning, when asked about former-Secretary of State Powell’s assertions of hidden racism in the Republican party:

I disagree with General Powell’s assessment of the Republican Party today,” Rubio said.

“The Republican Party is the party that [has] placed two Hispanics in the U.S. Senate,” Rubio told Tantros, “and we have an African-American senator in the United States Senate.”

Republican intolerance is so bad that, not only do we include two Hispanics (Rubio, Cruz) and one Black (Scott), but also two governors of Indian descent (Haley, Jindal) and two of Latin origin (Martinez, Sandoval). Much as I loathe ethnic bean-counting (1), if the Democrats are going to trot out their useful idiots to smear Republicans and conservatives with the race card, then it’s fair to ask where are the Democrats’ high-level minority leaders?

And let’s not forget Colin Powell, himself, who was made Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State under Republican administrations, and has at times almost been begged to be that party’s candidate for president.

Yeah, that’s “intolerant,” all right. Everyone knows that appointment to the senior-most position in the president’s cabinet, fourth in line from the Oval Office, is just another demeaning form of tokenism.

What a shnook.

RELATED: “Dark vein of intolerance,” Mr. Secretary? Perhaps you need a little lesson about the Democrats’ dirty history.

PS: Funny how Powell was trotted out to play the race card right after the storm broke over the photo above. Almost as if the administration needed a distraction…

UPDATE: I want everyone reading this to look at these two pictures and tell me which administration seems more genuinely “diverse and inclusive.”

Footnote:
(1) As a conservative, I care about a person’s principles and the content of their character, not irrelevancies such as skin color, ethnicity, or gender. I’ll leave that insulting game to Democrats and their willing dupes.

If you’re surprised this appeared on the pages of the New York Times, you haven’t been paying attention (hat tip):

WHEN Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina announced on Monday that she would name Representative Tim Scott to the Senate, it seemed like another milestone for African-Americans. Mr. Scott will complete the term of Senator Jim DeMint, who is leaving to run Heritage Foundation. He will be the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction; the first black Republican senator since 1979, when Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts retired; and, indeed, only the seventh African-American ever to serve in the chamber.

But this “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.

The cheerleading over racial symbolism plays to the Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters, who favored Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by huge margins. Mrs. Haley — a daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India — is the first female and first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, the home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond.

Mr. Scott’s background is also striking: raised by a poor single mother, he defeated, with Tea Party backing, two white men in a 2010 Republican primary: a son of Thurmond and a son of former Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. But his politics, like those of the archconservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, are utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans. Mr. Scott has been staunchly anti-tax, anti-union and anti-abortion.

Even if the Republicans managed to distance themselves from the thinly veiled racism of the Tea Party adherents who have moved the party rightward, they wouldn’t do much better among black voters than they do now. I suspect that appointments like Mr. Scott’s are directed less at blacks — whom they know they aren’t going to win in any significant numbers — than at whites who are inclined to vote Republican but don’t want to have to think of themselves, or be thought of by others, as racist.

Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment, so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests, as when President Ronald Reagan named Samuel R. Pierce Jr. to weaken the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Clarence M. Pendleton to enfeeble the Commission on Civil Rights and Clarence Thomas to enervate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Disturbingly enough, the writer of this piece, Adolph L. Reed Jr., is a poli-sci prof at the University of Pennsylvania. I shudder to think what he teaches his students. For one thing, black Americans are probably more anti-abortion than white-Americans. And they’re also more pro-traditional marriage than white Americans, too. This guy and the facts clearly aren’t acquainted very well.

But why let such things like the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned untruthful race-baiting rant?

Interestingly enough, his own column is at odds with itself when you look at the actual facts. He says the GOP has made “no real progress” on race, yet Scott was elected and re-elected to the US Congress in a majority WHITE Congressional district in SC (same same for Allen West two years ago), and Gov. Haley, a woman of Indian descent, was elected in a state where whites (and men) are still the majority. This in spite of the fact that she had to deal with disgusting racial politics by old-guard extremists in her own party during the primary. These were not APPOINTMENTS – they were ELECTIONS. Did those ‘racist’ majorities elect “minorities” like Scott and Haley to soothe their racial consciences or did they vote based on ability? I mean, if we’re supposed to believe Reed, if you’re a white person voting for a black Democrat, you’re not a racist voting out of a strong sense of white guilt, so doesn’t it stand to reason if you’re a white person and you vote for a black Republican, you’re not a racist voting out of a sense of white guilt, either – or is Reed showing a double standard here when it comes to voting for black people? (rhetorical questions, of course)

What I find most sickening about Reed’s column is his assumption that white Republicans use black Republicans to “undermine black interests” – as if 1) black Republicans can’t think and act for themselves, and 2) as if “black interests” are carved in stone with no variation. Well, they might be to narrow-minded racial bigots like Reed, but there are actually a lot of black people out there who DO think outside of the box and have concluded that liberal policies have been bad for America – not just bad for black people, but bad for all Americans. Then again, black people who don’t toe the liberal line do what great leaders like MLK encouraged them to do and that is think for themselves and to judge people based on the content of their character not their race. How dare they!?

Let’s also use Reed’s same “logic” regarding black people supposedly needing to vote based on “black interests” and apply it to white people, say, in the 1800s. Back then, would he have advocated whites needing to vote based on “white interests” which, at the time, were wrapped around being able to own and keep slaves on their plantations so they could make money and live comfortable, fancy lifestyles? Probably not, because in that case, voting based on “white interests” disenfranchised a whole race of people, and did a severe disservice to this nation’s guiding principle that all men were created equal.

With that in mind, you’d think a professor like Reed would understand why black conservatives have chosen a different path and have decided that group-think is not just dangerous for the black community but for their other fellow citizens as well. But Reed, like so many other elite liberal professors, has it ingrained in his brain that there’s simply no way in hell that a black American would want to be anything other than a liberal Democrat because Democrats “help” black people. Those who defy that mold are instantly cast in the Uncle Tom role by closed-minded “intellectuals” like Reed and others who are disgraces to their profession by implying that having a mind of your own rather than marching to the same old tired “victim” drum is a bad thing.

I weep for the future of America, if this willfully ignorant “educator” and others like him continue to get by with spewing this garbage.